Jeff Sessions Is Going to Fill Those Prisons One Way or Another

For a guy who is brazenly redefining what recusal means, to say nothing of a guy whose testimony before Congress was, ahem, incomplete, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is certainly letting his freak flag fly. From Tiger Beat On The Potomac:

Sessions is withdrawing a 2013 directive from Attorney General Eric Holder that instructed federal prosecutors not to specify the amount of drugs involved when charging low-level and non-violent drug offenders. That policy effectively gave judges discretion to set sentences lower than the mandatory punishments ranging from five years to life in prison federal law dictates when someone is convicted of a crime involving a certain quantity of illegal drugs.

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This is about more than reviving the failed "war" on drugs. This is about filling the prisons, mostly with people of color, because JeffBo is entirely a creature of the era of Massive Resistance in its many forms and coded disguises. It also renders the administration as incoherent on this policy issue as the president* himself is on the subject of why he canned the FBI director. After all, this was an administration that shed many crocodile tears over the victims of the opioid crisis. Then it zeroed out the Office of National Drug Control Policy in its proposed budget. (Not that I entirely disagreed with either notion.)

Now, though, you've got an attorney general, whose record on equal protection can be fairly called spotty, tuning up the old calliope to a deafening pitch. If we had a president who was paying attention, this wouldn't bother me so much. But I remember when "criminal justice reform" was going to be the issue that reunited our polarized politics. Even Karl Rove was onboard. Rand Paul, the last true progressive, was a standard bearer. Then, Republicans took over the whole government and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III got installed in Bobby Kennedy's old chair, and here we are, but none of this is About Race, because nothing ever is About Race.

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